A grand tradition of Drupalcons is to end with a day of sprinting. Sprints are most often associated with a bunch of hackers chewing on code. Well, our community is more than code or coders. We are a rich community both in people and in the broader work we do to keep Drupal-land humming smoothly along. At this Drupalcon, like the last two, we’ll be having an all-day documentation sprint on the last day, March 7. This year we will be a bit more organized and we have a whole room set aside just for us. And just who is “us?” This year a big goal of mine is to really get the word out that everyone can help with docs. We need people from all skill sets, backgrounds and languages; newbie to code ninja. Documentation work is not just about writing. Even taking one hour to hop in to help will push Drupal forward in leaps and bounds.
The Drupalcon sprint page has more information about the kinds of things we will be working on, and we do cover the gamut. We will have detailed task lists and a bunch of people to help answer questions and get folks set up. Not everyone can come to DC obviously, but we will be sprinting ’round the world on that Saturday. The #drupal-docs IRC channel (on Freenode) will be humming as well, so you can still be part of the fun and craziness from the comfort of your own home. If you have been working with the docs and would like to help organize the day (mainly so my head doesn’t explode from trying to assist and direct several hundred people at the same time ;-)), either in DC or on IRC, please sign up on the sprint Doodle for times that you’ll be available. We’ll be talking about the specifics of the sprint on the documentation mailing list (with posts to the documentation team group as well).
We have over 4500 handbook pages and 425,000 users on Drupal.org. There are 1300 people coming to DC next week to get their Drupal geek on. I’d like to think that we can get a reasonable percentage of all these people to help us wrangle the massive amounts of documentation. We need to garden what we have, fill in empty spots and build better tools for our work. This is your community garden and it needs all of us to nurture it so we can all continue to reap the benefits. How did you learn what you know? I know that I learned my Drupal-fu by benefiting from the work of others in the community who took time to share. Even someone who spent 10 minutes cleaning up typos or bad links on an existing page, probably saved me much more than that amount of time in frustration. Pay it forward and be part of the fun.
RockTreeSky 